Skip to main content
Dessert

Italian Confectioner

A sugar candy made by molding powdered sugar into balls, boiling clarified sugar, and baking until dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Italian Confectioner

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the moulds

  1. Cut two pieces of wood, one concave and one convex, about the size of half an egg.

  2. Cut pieces of paper to form half a ball and fold them into small folds.

  3. Fill the paper forms with powdered loaf sugar.

  4. Pour about 1 inch of sugar into each mould.

  5. Place the half balls in the moulds without touching each other.

Boil and bake

  1. Boil clarified sugar until it reaches the blow stage.

  2. Put the filled moulds in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 6 hours.

Dry and finish

  1. Strain off the syrup and let the moulds dry for 7-8 hours.

  2. Turn the moulds upside down and remove the powdered sugar.

  3. Wet the interior paper with cold water to remove it easily.

  4. Smooth the edges with a fine file or scouring paper.

  5. Use a little gum Arabic to fix the two halves together.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Powdered loaf sugar
Fills the paper forms to shape the hollow sugar halves as they bake.
Clarified sugar
Boiled to the blow stage, it forms the sugar syrup that hardens into the shell.
Gum arabic
Acts as a binder that glues the two finished sugar halves together.

The step that matters

Boiling clarified sugar to the blow stage. Sugar boiled to the correct stage sets firm and hard when cooled. Under-boiled sugar stays sticky and soft, while over-boiled sugar turns brittle and can darken, so the timing of the boil controls the final shell.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes